Letters to Forget: Poems

by Kelly Caldwell Narrated by Elijah Guerra

Overview

The debut of Kelly Caldwell, written from within the darkness of bipolar illness and the longing to claim her womanhood

“There can be no history of my body. My forgetfulness is in earnest. I check for it like for keys in a pocket. I've remained a girl all my life.”

With searing intelligence and great sensitivity, the poems of Kelly Caldwell-many addressed to the poet Cass Donish, her partner in the years before Caldwell's suicide at age thirty-one-swim through a complex matrix of transformations: mental illness, divorce, gender transition, and self-discovery. But they wrestle, too, with the poet's painful relationships with her family of Christian missionaries, who never affirmed her identity. In the sequence of “dear c.” poems scattered throughout these pages, Caldwell writes letters to her lover from an out-of-state residential hospital where she is receiving treatment for suicidal depression and mania. In a long poem titled “Self-Portrait as Job,” she offers us her lucid gaze and her queer take on the biblical figure-an understated yet powerful testament to her own suffering in a society whose structures may not contain her.

Both striking and elusive, both raw and learned, with a delicacy of syntax that challenges us to interrogate becoming itself, Kelly Caldwell asks: What kind of fragile agency is at the heart of obliterating change?

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

It is almost impossible to say I feel blessed by Letters to Forget because within it is great pain, loneliness, loss, and ordinary madness. Yet Kelly Caldwell has composed with a lyrical precision and syntactical range that approach transcendence. I return to the image of Gentle flesh carrying in the great sleep a storm. It comforts as it haunts. Here is a poetry that holds the hushed now in which Kelly live[s] in time’s pause between [her] voice. As one body stumbles out of another: this is her noun’s new nearness. In the final section she writes, Memory can collapse time to such an extent that something may thus live and die almost simultaneously. And I realize this is the God we have in common: simultaneity. It is this God that Kelly speaks to, with, through, about, and sometimes against with stunning intimacy. Lionhearted, brilliant, and tender, as she is made new, so are we. Toward a lathed new life. Turn. Be with this book and be blessed.” —TC Tolbert, author of Gephyromania and The Quiet Practices

“Across a mix of epistolary prose-poems, denser and periodized lyrics, and narrative, Kelly Caldwell’s Letters to Forget attends to what affect conditions and enables—alienation, suffering, debt—but too the tenderness of small, small things: exchanges between loves, the intimacies of animals, French philosophy, an attempted purchase of a home. We made an offer on the house now what, she writes before concluding, Debt. Is its own reward. Such a verse of both/and, a repetition that reveals two logics at once, is one among many qualities of Caldwell’s work—concision, elegant repetitions, reparative imagining in defeat. In an extended narrative, 'Self-Portrait as Job,' she reimagines the biblical narrative across a life of queerness and hospitalization, the unlawfulness revealed across each. Part of the law, g-d tells the speaker, is / the side-eye between / Forgiving and forgetting. Letters to Forget reveals not just a poet who could’ve been, but a fully-formed poet among and with us. I am the last woman, she tells us, In the world. Yet, she writes of the house, other homes are possible. May the book you hold be both the last and possible, both. Also the distance of the fields // Also the proximity of the sunlight.” —Jos Charles, author of a Year & other poems

“These prose poems, sliced sentences, scary epistolary creations and archetypal tours reach from literal hospitals to the cosmic spaces of troubled queer hearts, from extremes of emotion to other extremes, white-hot all the while, like slices of fallen stars, ‘like phosphor along the seam of a rock,’ erotic, enticing, terrified, ready to share. ‘Out of a question comes a pinhole camera. Out of a question comes a posthumous sun.’ This book’s arranger, creator, conjurer sees herself in the rural Midwest and in the Bible’s Job, forever communicating with friends, or false friends, who cannot fully take her in, asking ‘who can survive without a listener?’ She ‘glues the grass to her fuzzy dress,’ as if the chlorophyll cells became shattered panes; she reaches out ‘until the scar arrives,’ in a series of missives where ‘no one promises light or tomorrow,’ though this book will be around tomorrow, tomorrow, the years after that, alongside other poems and songs of heart-crushing archetypes: think H.D. and Sappho, Yona Wallach and Tori Amos.  Caldwell has left us a book written in urgent images, in the language of myth, but also in ‘medical electricity’ that rouses ‘the Rabbit/ Of Hope,’ where ‘life’s as frayed as an old silver blanket to wrap the beings of fiction in.’ We are those beings. This book is that blanket. It glows.” —Stephanie Burt, author of We Are Mermaids

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160480237
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/03/2024
Series:	Cass Donish and Kelly Caldwell Books , #2
Edition description:	Unabridged